Corbyn’s tipping tirade lays bare his anti-business agenda Jeremy Corbyn has had another brainwave. The Labour leader wants to make it illegal for businesses to “pocket” tips and optional service charges. Some restaurants and hospitality firms currently collectivise what we add to our bills or give to waiters and waitresses. They might directly pool tips to redistribute them through a common fund system [...]
Long-term economic growth is a prize both parties should be fighting for Ah yes, post-Budget week. That time when a modest tax change here or a spending announcement there generates reams of analysis about who’s been made “better off” or “worse off” at the stroke of the chancellor’s pen. When, for a second, the decision to try to implement VAT on warm takeaway foods or announce a [...]
Ignore the chancellor, we don’t need Chequers to end austerity I generally presume cynicism in politicians’ arguments. But Philip Hammond implying a Chequers-style relationship with the EU is needed to “end austerity” was shocking in its brazenness. Ahead of the October Budget, the chancellor has echoed Theresa May in suggesting that looser government spending is just around the corner. Their calculation seems to be that [...]
Cromwell should fall – and so should all government statues October 9, 2018 For those of us whose first exposure was Monty Python’s song about him, it’s difficult to get animated about whether Oliver Cromwell’s statue should continue to adorn the parliamentary estate. But the legacy of the seventeenth century Lord Protector does seem to upset many, not least Brits of Irish descent. The historian Jeremy Crick recently renewed [...]
Theresa May’s vision-free approach is alienating us all October 2, 2018 An opening day Conservative conference speech by former CBI Director-General Digby Jones might not have been expected to diagnose the Prime Minister’s key weakness. But defending Theresa May’s Brexit approach, the former Labour minister unwittingly exposed the reason that the Prime Minister has alienated much of her party: she is a vision-free zone. Riffing off [...]
Forget economics, immigration policy is more about our values September 25, 2018 You're probably tired of me saying it, dear reader. But a big problem with supposed “evidence-based policy” is that the conclusions we derive from evidence often take our underlying aims for granted. If we’re considering a tax cut, no evidence-base showing that it could create a positive GDP effect will convince you if your [...]
Corbyn won’t stop until the government controls everything September 4, 2018 Back in November 2013, the general secretary of the Unite union, Len McCluskey, outlined what he believed was so refreshing about then Labour leader Ed Miliband’s platform. “What is particularly important is the underlying rationale for what Ed has proposed,” McCluskey boomed. “There are some things too important to be left to the market.” “Too [...]
Politicians have abandoned economics for paternalism August 30, 2018 Have advocates of lifestyle and environmental regulation given up pretending that the policies they advocate are grounded in good economic analysis? Two stories from last week suggest so. The first was reporting around a new study by the Global Burden of Disease project, which concluded that even moderate drinking increases the risk of alcohol-related health [...]
The chancellor’s shambolic national insurance hike is based on a faulty reading of aggregate statistics March 14, 2017 "Britain is damning itself to be a low wage, low productivity economy”. How many headlines like that have we read over the past few years? Certainly, the UK has performed poorly when it comes to overall real wage growth since the financial crisis, reflective of weak aggregate productivity growth. But often these average statistics are [...]
The US and UK are failing to confront the long-term drivers of explosive debt growth March 7, 2017 The chancellor Philip Hammond will take to the despatch box tomorrow to deliver his Budget. The media will pore over the plethora of announcements made – fiddly tax changes here, growth forecast revisions there. But this short-term focus misses the real policy story of the post-crisis period. The political class is failing to address our [...]
